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The Burman dodged round the corner of the hut, and struck at once into a hard well-trodden path which was at once swallowed up in the thick shade of a close-set grove of bamboos. It was a path leading to a pagoda much frequented by the villagers, and would show no sign by which they might be tracked on the morrow.
Cloaked and hooded white forms, or half-clad apparitions wrapped in what looked like dirty bagging, mingled with commonplace figures in Western dress. Low houses with flat roofs or miniature domes, small, secret doorways, tiny windows like eyes narrowed for spying, and overhanging upper stories supported on close-set, projecting sticks of mellow brown which meant great age.
And every ardent sheet of it had a grape-like bloom, made by the velvety quality of the thousands of close-set petals; they gave the sensation of exquisite touch merely by looking at them, while their passionate colour and scent made the senses drunken on pure loveliness. That was how it had taken Boase how in normal days it would have taken Ishmael, even more keenly.
Seeing, however, no baleful apparitions of either nature, I pursued my way between rich flower-beds, in search of the necessary Princess. Conditions declared her presence patently as trumpets; without this centre such surroundings could not exist. A pavilion, gold topped, wreathed with lush jessamine, beckoned with a special significance over close-set shrubs.
Look at this face, look at this dress, look at this dress! Ah! now you know all about it, 'little Miss Wimple, of course; and this shall be your home, and you are safe here." When Miss Wimple began to speak, she stood somewhat off from the bed; for Madeline, with a gesture full of hate, and close-set lips that looked dangerous, had thrust her back.
She was nearly six feet in height; she was correspondingly built; her arms appeared to be as brawny as a navvy's; her face was of the shape and roundness of a full moon; her mouth was a wide slit, her nose a button; her eyes were as shrewd and hard as they were small and close-set. A very Grenadier of a woman! and apparently quite unmoved by the knowledge that everybody was staring at her.
It was very quiet; there was no cry nor call of beast or bird in the darkness; the long rustle of the tree-tops sounded as faint as the far-off wash of distant seas. Nor did the resemblance cease there; the close-set files of the pines and cedars, stretching in illimitable ranks to the horizon, were filled with the immeasurable loneliness of an ocean shore.
Such a temperament he had inherited from his father's fiery heart and his mother's suffering, close-set lips as he had remembered them in the little pictures of her; and he now set himself, while doing his routine work every day, to do one particular thing to see, talk to, plead with, struggle with the woman, or girl, rather child even, to his thoughts, so fragile she was this girl who had given him back his life against her own marauding relatives.
By the end of July he felt that he could slacken up here, too, having pretty well exhausted the field, and the first day of August red-letter day in the annals of science saw him unlock the sacred drawer with a close-set face. And now the Schedule, so long lapsed, was reinstated, with Four Hours a Day segregated to Magnum Opus. A pitiful little step at reconstruction, perhaps, but still a step.
Came a roaring crash beneath whose dire shock Sir Pertolepe's ranks were riven and rent asunder, and over and through their red confusion Sir Benedict rode in thunderous, resistless might, straight for where, above their mid-most, close-set ranks, fluttered and flew Sir Pertolepe's Raven banner.
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